During a visit to an Old West tourist attraction, Josie is requested by a man named Carter to fill in a survey in exchange for some money to help her pay her studies. Later on both go out for a drink and Carter tells her about the need to change the past in order to prevent a great massacre. Half drunk, Josie accepts, just to suddenly find herself appear in the 1940s. Why does everybody seem to know her? Will she have what it takes to change the course of history?
Despite the fact that this book is categorized as Romance, it is not, or it is not its main genre. This is about time travel, not very sci-fy but more in a fantastic way, like Doctor Who, show that is mentioned several times throughout the book, as one of Josie's favorites. What I mean about more fantastic is that there is not even a mere attempt to explain anything of what happens in a scientific way, and I almost laughed at the fact that Josie was going to get a vaccine that would cover any past, present, and future disease known to man. It is kind of ludicrous, but this is one of the concessions we usually give to the Time Travel genre, especially when it is inspired by Doctor Who.
Josie's real mission is unknown to her and us, and Lizzy Ford built up the intrigue in a very smart way, giving us pieces here and there, while also tricking us to think what she wanted. This has worked very well, and this was a book I couldn't put down, since I needed to know why some things were like they were presented and how we could be deceived.
Even though I think Josie was a bit too naive at the beginning, I was able to connect to her later on. The story is written in first person from her point of view, and as she is the only character, apart from Carter, from our time, it was easy to follow her train of thought and understand her motivations. Apart from her, the rest of characters were not very developed, but this did not stop some of them from being very interesting. I especially liked the two Indian twins.
I said that this was not a Romance book, but there is romance in it. I am not sure about the need of it, and for me it felt a bit forced, but I guess the romance and sex scenes will be appreciated by those who expect some romance in this book. Somehow I wanted to know Taylor better, and I think the ending would have felt a bit stronger for me if he would have been a bit more developed.
What did not work very well for me was Lillian Yves narration. Yves gave a clear and emotive narration, but I found some little issues that were distracting when put together. First, Yves tended to introduce pauses in the middle of sentences, like reading in slow bursts, and then the pauses between sentences felt like artificially shortened (probably during the editing part). This caused that some pauses between sentences were even shorter than the pauses within sentences, which gave the narration a robotic feel. If it was not for the expressive narration by Yves, it would have sounded exactly like Text-To-Speech. I find it weird that nobody has mentioned this on any review, since this bothered me from beginning to end. Another minor issue was that all voices sounded similar to the ear, and this coupled with the previous issue, made following dialogs difficult, since the shortened pauses between sentences and paragraphs did not make it clear when a character stopped talking and another one started.
All in all, it was a wonderful audiobook, and the tension and the intrigue were so well built that I couldn't stop listening. I am looking forward to the next in the series.
I received this audiobook as part of my participation in a blog tour with Audiobookworm Promotions. The tour is being sponsored by Lizzy Ford. The gifting of this audiobook did not affect my opinion of it.